As 2019 ended, I
recalled two interviews that I had heard on BBC radio. The first was with the
pastor of a church in Texas, explaining why his congregation supported the
separation of children from parents who had been apprehended crossing the
border with Mexico. The pastor explained that if the police raided a drug den
in Los Angeles, for example, the children would have to be separated from Mummy
and Daddy to be cared for by Social Services. Similarly, when Mummy and Daddy
cross the border, they have broken the law and the children must be separated
from them. I consulted a friend who is a retired New Jersey judge. He told me
that crossing the border without the correct papers is a misdemeanour, which in
New Jersey includes offences such as spitting in the street, punishable by
imprisonment only after three offences.
The second interviewee
was a stand-up comic who had been a volunteer with a charity that supports
people living near Calais, who are seeking to get to the UK. Some of these
people at least are children, separated from other family members during a long
and perilous journey, and who are trying to join family members in the UK. The
British government has an agreement with France to prevent their reaching the
UK and has spent considerable sums to do so. I suspect that little or nothing
has been spent to make life more tolerable for people stranded between two
unwelcoming governments. The comic explained that she had first volunteered
when the people she helped lived in temporary structures known as the “Jungle”.
Subsequently, under the terms of the agreement between the two governments the
“Jungle” structures were destroyed to “encourage” the residents to seek refuge
in the French government’s “reception” centres. However, many residents soon
returned to live in tents. Apparently, the Compagnie Républicaine de Sécurité
(riot police) now slash the tents during the night and remove the shoes of
those asleep in them, including the shoes of children. This is a rather
heartless deterrence strategy.
The comic told of
meeting a young Syrian man who was homeless in the UK while he waited for his asylum
claim to be assessed. He was an architect, a graduate of a fine university in
Damascus, but now homeless for reasons with which we are all familiar. As their
friendship developed, the comic came to realize that the Syrian architect was
not in any real sense a “migrant” but quite simply a person struggling with
circumstances that we can barely comprehend, who had lost the right to live in
his own land and was seeking a place on Earth that would give him a temporary
refuge. In other words, “migrant” was not his identity, his personality, his
profession, still less his identity. It is just a lazy word we use to lump
together as one amorphous whole individuals struggling with misfortune.
This made me ponder
that I was twice a “migrant”. The first occasion was from 1974-1976 when I was
a research student in Mexico. On the second occasion, I arrived in Washington,
D.C. in 1977 to set up a small Delaware corporation, Grove’s Dictionaries of
Music, Inc., in its turn a subsidiary of a Hong Kong corporation, owned
ultimately by Macmillan Publishers. In Mexico I was a pale-skinned rarity,
especially in small mountain towns which I visited to meet the few remaining
veterans of the 1910-1920 Revolution. I was asked “Do you have tea at 5pm every
day?” or “Is it true that the English bathe only once a week?” Once it was
evident that I was not a gringo, I was readily stereotyped. I was
equally noteworthy when I visited a Texas college campus, or my printer in
Virginia. My accent and strange choices of vocabulary marked me out as
different, but in America gave me much more prestige than was afforded to a
Mexican chamber maid, or a Central American farm worker.
I also once received a
criminal conviction: for driving without due care and attention, an offence
that probably qualifies as a misdemeanour in the USA. I wonder if the Texas
pastor would have recommended a referral of my sons to Social Services.
So, my New Year’s
resolution is not to label anybody a migrant or a criminal, but to attempt to
see the person. And I will do my best to encourage others to avoid fitting
labels to people who have qualities that labels do not describe.
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